Hot-to-Molly

<sup>A typical pun from Burma Vita:

Pedro
Walked
Back Home By Golly
His Bristly Chin
Was Hot-to-Molly
Burma Shave

Went to a cat show this past Saturday.  It was supposed to be a really big one, but wasn’t.  For some reason cat shows are losing their popularity.  There were a lot of Maine Coon Cats – enormous creatures with lots of thick fur – but hardly and Sphyinx cats – small, very thin animals with fantastically narrow faces and huge ears.  I bought a cat-themed t-shirt I’ll wear in England, and ordered a pair of brilliantly sparkling saphire-blue earrings.  I saw a cat fancier wearing them and she told me she’d bought them from a vendor at the show, but when I went over to see them, the artist had brought only that one pair.  But she’ll make me a duplicate pair.  I also bought a book by Jerome Tonneson called Buttercup, a self-published book with a lovely photograph of his cat on the cover.  Perhaps surprisingly (self-published books can be awful), it’s charming and really well-written, with lots of photographs.

I went to my opthamalogist on Monday, and he says the cataract in my right eye has now reached a stage where removal is called for.  We have set a tentative date of February 9.  My left eye’s cataract was removed several years ago with no complications.  I’ve been aware for several months that it was going to happen, and I’m glad it will be done and healed before I leave for England in late March.  I want a clear view of all there is to see.

There was a time when movies like “Selma” and “American Sniper” would have been high on the list of movies I want to see.  But somehow that isn’t true any more – or at least not right now.  On Thursday I’m going with three other people to see “Paddington.”  It’s not quite as frivolous a choice as it might seem.  As a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, I am an abbess, and one rule of nuns is that they can’t go gadding about alone (actually as a good Benedictine, I'm not supposed to be gadding about at all, but if you’ve read Canterbury Tales, you know they gadded to their hearts’ content).  But no one else in my shire wanted to be a nun, so I invented a Mass Priest, Father Hugh of Paddington.  A small, brown fellow, with kind, anxious eyes, he even had a tonsure.  I take him everywhere, of course - he once sat on the queen's lap! - so he had become well known in the SCA.  As research into Medieval nunneries, I wrote about him, and me, in a set of chap books set at Deer Abbey in the fifteenth century, and then in a series of short stories published by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine – though in the stories he wasn’t a stuffed bear.  I loved the original Paddington Bear books and I understand they’ve done an excellent job bringing him to life on the silver screen.</sup>